Welcome friends to Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children.

I'm your host, Richard Wolf.

Today's program is going to touch on military spending,

particularly the United States spending on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

We're going to be talking about Chinese production of electric vehicles and how that is

shaking literally the whole world.

We're going to be exploring briefly how worker co-ops can become even more of a central part of labor union organizing in the years

ahead.

And finally in the first half, we'll take a look at some recent remarkable union representation

elections at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the second half, we'll be talking with writer, labor organizer,

Kim Kelly, who's been a remarkable new energetic force in the labor movement here in the United States.

So let's jump right in.

Many of you have asked me about defense spending, military spending, and to talk about it.

And so I've decided I'm going to do it,

but I'm going to do it in separate units.

So each point gets carefully made and not lost

in trying to do too much in too short a period of time.

The United States is currently spending tens of billions of dollars, just counting the last few years. And above all, this money has gone

to the war in Ukraine, basically providing mostly military support to the Ukrainian armed forces,

and secondarily an enormous delivery of military equipment again to Israel, which is being used by Israel in its

war on Gaza. I want to give you some sense of the dimensions and then the analytics.

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